Stephen Clark writer

October 15, 2016

Terrible to hear today that Stephen has died. We worked together for many years on Zorro, Carmen La Cubana and most recently on Dr Blighty in his home town of Brighton. He was a gentle man plagued by mysterious ill health, but was always battling through it with great humour. He seemed strangely invincible so his death still feels like a surprise and one is left mourning the loss of a rich talent, full of great compassion, wit and skill.

I saw the book and libretto of Zorro develop through many drafts from our first try outs in Eastbourne and a slightly traumatic tour to stunningly rewritten to come into the Garrick for what turned into the surprise Musical hit of 2008 . The show went on to productions in Paris, Moscow, Tokyo,Holland and Atlanta with Stephen and director Chris Renshaw continuing to nurture and develop the production. He would often ring or email with staging questions and was always open to debate on to how to solve the practical problems, and really appreciated the role of design in the creative process.

Carmen La Cubana was another collaboration with Chris Renshaw,again showing Stephen’s open hearted approach to collaboration, taking in ideas from all sides and shaping them into his own distinctive voice. Working with the original Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones, they took ideas shaped in workshops in Cuba into a fantastic script for the production which opened in Paris earlier this year.

Also this year I suggested Stephen as a writer who could come on board the Dr Blighty project for 14-18 Now/Brighton Festival. At very short notice he created a series seemingly simple but telling vignettes that captured imagined moments in the experience of the Indian soldiers hospitalised within the Brighton pavilion in 1915 and also how the native residents responded to the strange new circumstances. I will never forget the monologues he created for the local butcher whose initial practical description of how the halal meat is prepared slowly developed into a horrified break down in the face of so much human suffering.

Stephen was such a thoughtful, intelligent and funny man. I’ll never forget meeting him for my initial Dr Blighty audition. I was given the Scribe’s text to read, and remember asking who wrote this. Stephen said he was the writer. The excerpt was about how the Scribe would have translate words of the Indian soldiers letters so they could be censored by the British officers for any inflammatory content, before being sent to their loved ones’ in India. The passage was about how the Scribe felt so guilty that their meaning and their feelings were being lost in his translation. I told him how beautiful his writing was.